Monday, March 9, 2015

How many times do you need to turn the corner before you realize you're just going around the block?

So the so-called "CIRC report" has "dropped." Despite the name, the CIRC report is not a long-term study on the effects of circumcision on males. "CIRC" is in fact an acronym for "Cycling Independent Reform Commission," and if you're totally El-Oh-Elling at the use of "cycling" and "reform" in the same sentence you then probably should. Ostensibly, the CIRC report lays bare the state of affairs in the rolling shitshow that is professional cycling under the auspices of the UCI, and Peloton Magazine has done a nice job of summing it up:

You probably didn't need a €3 million report to figure a lot of this stuff out. For example, it shouldn't surprise you that pro cyclists can still figure out how to take banned performance-enhancing drugs without getting caught:

2) Is EPO still being used in the peloton? Despite improvements to the science underlying the ABP, it is still possible for riders to micro-dose using EPO without getting caught. The Commission also heard that riders are confident that they can take a micro-dose of EPO in the evening because it will not show up by the time the doping control officers (DCOs) could arrive to test at 6 a.m.

Also, if you've been paying attention, you already know that pro cyclists are crashing (literally) because they're popping pills:

8) Are crashes being caused by drugs taken by riders? The Commission was also told by a rider of a “pills system” used during races in 2011, involving up to 30 pills daily. … He said team riders also took tranquilizers at night and anti-depressants in the morning. He believed some of his crashes were due to the effects of these drugs.

And you don't need to be a narcotics officer to figure out that the best places to get banned drugs are the same places you find anonymous sex--i.e. the Internet and the gym:

12) Where do riders get banned drugs? Two newer sources of PEDs are the Internet and gyms, which are favored sources for acquiring drugs for those without access to the right doctors. The Internet has opened up a market in new designer steroids and allows riders to identify and obtain drugs that are still in clinical trials.

Which is why, if you've been to the gym this morning, Riccardo Riccò probably waylaid you in the showers and offered to sell you EPO and then blow you.

15) Is there doping in Gran Fondos? Masters races were also said to have middle-aged businessmen winning on EPO, with some of them training as hard as professional riders…. Some professional riders explained that they no longer ride in the Gran Fondos because they were so competitive due to the number of riders doping.

That should not be even remotely surprising in any way. Drugs are central to the lifestyle of the middle-aged male. Boner drugs, hair growth drugs, sleep aid drugs...if you're already on all of that, why wouldn't you also take drugs to ride a bike?

So what do we make of this report? Well, if you're a sportswriter for a mainstream publication, you laugh at those crazy cyclists:

Now, I happen to really like Jason Gay--especially his earlier work. Still, this is a guy who also writes about mainstream American sports such as baseball, and football, and basketball, so he should know better. Really, cycling's on "another level" compared to these sports? Are you kidding me?!? On top of the rampant doping, recreational drugs, and DWIs, you've got routine stories about gunplay. Assault. Rape. Prostitution. Domestic violence. (And let's not even start in on murder.) Come on! These people are freaking psychotic! Plus, these sports are all fed by universities, and there is no more frightening creature than an American college-age male.

Basically, David Millar was invited to speak to the commission, but he didn't make the time for them:

My first feeling on finishing reading the CIRC report was one of disappointment. I didn’t speak to CIRC. They ‘invited’ me. Only they forgot I was then an active professional cyclist who spends most of his time on the road and has a wife and two baby boys at home. I never found time to travel to them and they never once mentioned coming to me. I regret not making the time after reading the report.
Now, however, he doesn't like the report:So who did they interview in order to gauge the state of the modern peloton? Because the majority of those published interviewees left the sport due to a doping ban never to return. Aren’t these exactly the type of people who suffer from ‘the “false consensus effect” where athletes with a history of drug use overestimate the prevalence of drug use among other athletes’ that the report talks of?

Because it doesn't go along with his his bullshit "occasional bad apple" narrative:

But not long ago doping was endemic. The barrel was rotten. Now dopers are a minority, more akin to finding the occasional bad apple amongst the good. We need to maintain this state of affairs and start looking after the clean riders and not treating them all as criminals. They already endure the legacy of tarnished generations.

The "bad apple" concept is crucial to pro cycling, because the idea is that all the heroes are clean and it's only the losers who are doping so they can keep up. It's the same spurious "clean on top, dirty on the bottom" myth that Americans use to justify corporate behavior. (The purity of the profit motive will result in prosperity that will trickle down to us all, don'tcha know.)

Well, it's certainly no surprise to hear Millar complaining, because we all know he behaves when things don't go his way:

If we collectively demand better; if we hold the UCI to its reform commitments; if we hold teams and riders to a standard that they themselves have increasingly started to promote; and if we as fans vote with our eyes and dollars, then maybe, finally, we have a shot at breaking the cycle.

Yeah, right.

Hey, I can't blame the cycling magazines and websites for their misguided optimism. It's crucial to what they do that pro cycling sort of "zeroes itself out" and goes straight. That way, their tales of sporting heroics are no longer constantly undermined by scandal, and they can continue to tell you that the Tour winner's bike setup and equipment choice means more than his doping regimen, which is crucial to advertisers. This is why you're always reading about cycling "turning a corner," and about the "bad old days" that are finally behind us. (The Festina era, the Lance Armstrong era, and so on.)

Unfortunately for them (or maybe fortunately, because cognitive dissonance is an infinitely renewable resource), this is never going to happen, for the simple reason that this sport began as a publicity stunt, and it's at best naive and at worst crazy to expect a publicity stunt to morph into something with integrity. If this were true, Kim Kardashian's ass would be running for president in 2016. Nothing moves towards integrity. Even things that start out meaning well turn to shit--just look at religion! Yet somehow a "Cannonball Run"-esque scramble across France is supposed to become an unsullied testament to the transcendent power of human will a century later?

Please.

Then I think of my own relationship to the sports in general and cycling in particular. As a young child I tried to like watching mainstream professional sports like baseball, but try as I might I just couldn't buy in, and as I got older the only way I could relate to them was by laughing at the players' funny names (Johnny Wockenfuss) or at their slovenly physical appearance and odd facial hair (Johnny Wockenfuss). Also, by about middle school, it was difficult not to notice that many of the kids who were into playing sports also happened to be gigantic assholes.

Therefore, I didn't give following professional sports another thought until I started racing road bikes, at which point pro cycling suddenly became very interesting to me. After all, I had no idea what goes through a baseball player's head while he stands around in a field scratching his balls and spitting tobacco juice, but I did know what it feels like to be in a breakaway, or to get dropped on a climb. It felt good to be a cycling fan, too. After years of tuning out whenever the conversation turned to sports, suddenly I had a sport of my own. Suddenly, people who got excited about the Superbowl or the World Series were less idiotic to me, because for the first time in my life I was getting excited about big sporting events too.

Therefore, because I was actually participating in the sport, it took me awhile to realize it was fundamentally no different than any of the others, and that I was still the same person who fundamentally didn't give a shit. In fact, it took me years of trying not to get dropped while known dopers pulled the field around in training races, and buying stupid equipment, and reading about yet another doping scandal, and starting a bike blog, and even personally getting to know the "heroes" of the sport themselves.

Alas, I couldn't see the forest for the trees--or, more accurately, I couldn't see the peloton for all the Lycra-clad asses around me.

In retrospect, I find it both amusing and humbling that it took me at least a decade and a half of solid involvement as a cycling fan to figure out what I knew after watching like three baseball games when I was seven years old, which is that: 1) It's all the same crap to me; and 2) By far the best part is making fun of the athletes' silly names and hair:

As for pro cycling and riding a bike, the two remain mutually exclusive.

With an ideal weight of under 140lbs for a 6 foot tall male, cycling has more in common with runway modeling than it does an actual sport. For you grieving disenfranchised fans, cheer up there's always bowling.

In that picture, Lance and the old guy are red from the eyeballs down. Perhaps all their blood is being drained into a centrifuge...or other places of the body that rely on the introduction of blood to operate.

I agree, but I'm still a fan. At least these days some of the guys are clean, and hey micro-dosing is better than mega-dosing. But I also root for the NBA where referees fixed games. It's just entertainment. They take less drugs than wrestlers, at least.

I spent some time this weekend modifying my old CX bike so that it has flat bars. I can't believe that I hadn't done this sooner - road bars really do suck ass. I may be traveling further down the fred hole, but it was fun to go for a road ride and get the "look" from all of the stupid roadie assholes who think that a bike ride is a rolling fashion show.

Great post. I had something like your "Are you kidding me?!?" moment recently while listening to Fighting Talk, a BBC radio show in which journalists and alleged comedians spend half an hour shouting at each other, mostly about sport. They were asked which big sports event should be dropped by TV and why. A journalist called John Rawlins named the TdF, partly on the grounds that cycling is 'completely corrupt'. Rawlins makes his living from reporting on professional boxing.

One other thing - I'd maybe add another to your list of juiced up sports - have you noticed how big tennis players have gotten in recent years? Just sayin'.

I was at the Toronto bike show this weekend, and I had to notice that vendors stopped using images of UCI riders and teams to sell bikes...I'm sorry folks, you're just going to have fun, you will no longer possibly win the TdeF. I also noticed a record low interest in $15,000 bicycles.

Fuck pro sports. At some point, some twats playing a game (which by definition, is not important) became somehow important and "worth" millions a year, because of an increasingly inactive portion of the population that needs to perspire and date burnout celebrities vicariously.

I don't want to be an apologist for the professional cycling community, but if the NFL, MLB, NHL, FIFA, NBA, or any other big money sports league were as aggressive in catching doping as the UCI was, well, professional sports would be dead.

It's a stupid report by a sport board of people who oversee a stupid marketing machine of stupidity, but damn looks so amazing on TV...

I grew up in the state with a thumb, hockey is huge there. Hockey, football and wrestling. I know there are cheats in hockey and football because I watched what my friends did to get more competitive. I also therefore know they never quit that because they are even more competitive now.

When the commissioner of a league openly states, "We don't have a PED problem, steroids don't help you skate." It goes a long way to show how clueless he is. He went so far as to point at Gretzky as proof that drugs don't help because Gretzky was small.

Well you dummy, cyclists aren't huge either.

It's a mess, but I firmly believe that wherever there is a shortcut to get at millions of dollars, people will take those shortcuts. We either need to accept that there will be people in our sports who don't belong there, or we need to lower the prizes given for their prowess.

I like pro sports, they give me 3 hours of reality-free TV. Unfortunately, many are now becoming Reality TV because of the scandals.

Hemopure, developed and produced by OPK Biotech, is a hemoglobin-based oxygen carrier based on chemically stabilized bovine hemoglobin. It has been developed for potential use in humans as an oxygen delivering bridge in cases when blood is not available or is not an option.

I believe this is what Tyler Hamilton was using when he got nailed by a new dope testing protocal at Vuelta a Espana.

"According to labels, the bags were filled with a hemoglobin-based oxygen carrier (HBOC) known as Hemopure, manufactured by the U.S.-based Biopure Corporation. The product is made from hemoglobin molecules that have been removed from the red cells of cow’s blood. Originally designed as an emergency blood substitute that requires no refrigeration, Hemopure has only been approved for human use in South Africa. U.S. clinical trials were recently suspended over safety concerns, but a similar product is currently used for veterinary purposes.Read more at http://velonews.competitor.com/2007/07/news/ex-cyclist-levels-doping-charges-at-rasmussen_12851#MGJ3vqb38SxGdhvT.99

and just about everyone else who was on the podium with him those seven years was dirty. #1 dirty, #2 dirty & #3 dirty makes for three baskets of dirty laundry. Of those 14 2nd & 3rd spots maybe 2 or 3 guys haven't been caught yet.

The riders are not the only ones responsible for the drug era of cycling. The organizers of the grand tours have to share some responsibility too. They kept making the tours harder and harder, it was almost as if they were trying to kill the riders.

It's not surprising that pro's resort to steroids and blood doping. What is really disappointing are amateurs doing the same thing for a Cheetos prime in a local race, being first in the group ride sprint, or,FFS, Strava KOM's. And if you think that's not happening, hang around a bunch of old people popping their anti aging drugs to keep up with the younger crowd.

Tyler Hamilton blood doped on someone else's blood, nothing high tech.Petacchi used perfluorocarbon (PFC) for a while, but that was also detected in canoeists and race horses.PFC was developed by the army as a blood substitute, but dropped after deemed too dangerous. Too dangerous for the army, that's a red flag.

Tennis started getting out of control (and becoming boring as shit) as soon as it became all about just hitting the shit out of the ball from the baseline all day. Give me the days of Bjorn Borg, by crackie!

There hasn't been a clean athlete since Babe Ruth barnstormed around, fueled by boose and hot dogs.

I gave up competitive sports a long time ago. Even low level games have way too many assholes looking to win the World Series in the bar leagues. I just want to pedal the bike and pray the moron in the Lexus with his conciousness buried in the smartphone doesn't find me today.

"That should not be even remotely surprising in any way. Drugs are central to the lifestyle of the middle-aged male. Boner drugs, hair growth drugs, sleep aid drugs...if you're already on all of that, why wouldn't you also take drugs to ride a bike?" Well said and oh so true! Sadly these are the guys that pro cycling panders to. These are the guys who can afford the bikes, the clothes, the dope. And judging by all the "Freds" running down children and old people on the bike paths and gumming up traffic on the streets, there is still plenty of money to be made, bad image or not.

Great post. I think all the doping scandals in all sports have tempered my fanatacism for them, but not turned me away completely. Growing up north of the US meant non-stop hockey, while I took to baseball at a young age, where it was often shunned by my peers as too boring. Uncles of mine introduced me to cycling because they were amateur bike racers. I took to riding and watching the tour then more races, though never took to racing. Cycling of course was also deemed too boring. I would think baseball and cycling have about the same amount of collusion regarding the ignoring of massive doping and now I just don't care who does what and I am no longer naive enough to declare any of them as my "hero". I still find it exciting to sit in the stadium or watch tactics play out in a day race or stage race. If you just ignore the money, scandal, media, obsession with gear, branding, sponsors, dietary updates, conspiracy theories, mascots, changes in uniform and inane decision making of governing bodies there is still something to enjoy in taking in a game or a race.

Thank goodness for BSNYC! It is the ONE-AND-ONLY zone where the cycling bullsh*t gets called out. BSNYC cycling reality-checks…dyed-in-the-wool, no bullsh*t bike riders are lucky to have BSNYC. Damn lucky.

I don't buy for one minute they are all clean. Perhaps by the letter but not by the intent. Just like Lance, who is getting screwed just cuz he cheated better than everyone else.

Living in Boulder in 2006-ish I once heard "If they're going to say they aren't taking anything they should actually not be taking anything." ... in reference to a new pro team ... From somebody as an intern. I report, you decide. I couldn't get more info. Just sayin. Yada yada yada bisque.

Masters racing? Check out who sponsors a big one in Boulder and make your own jokes and inferences: http://www.reald-cycling.org/about/

I usually float along around 14 enjoyin the ride. I got curious earlier today and found out my favorite bike, Slick Willy, simply flies. 18.91 mph over a 20.22 mile loop. 70 degrees, no wind, roadie kit, Sidi shoes with Look pedals. Willy being a Portlandish cross bike sporting full length SKS rear fender with lo-rise crabon bar and Ergon grips. Best time on that loop using a 16 lb swiss "race machine" with same Dura ace wheels and tires after many attempts was 19.06 mph. So either a drop bar "road bike" is a scorching .15 mph faster over an identical 20 miles than a Wilier Mortirolo cross frame using same wheels and tires or I'm sleepwalking to 24 hr fitness while futzing with my galaxy tab? Hmmmmm. . . . another myth in the bin on mythbuster Monday. The stupid racing bike thing had me for 20 years and thousands of $$. Never got to spit back at The Cobra either damn!

So that explains why some of the guys who we winning not long ago when the barrel was rotten are still winning.

Rockcrusher, I know you still have an interest in racing beyond the names and hairstyles, you are just too cool to admit it. Besides, the doping scandals are just as interesting and dramatic as the racing is.

I'm an ex and I have to say that was a nice post. But I have to say also, curse the drugs all you want but until you've been a super hero don't cast your stones. Going that fast for that long up those climbs and out those flats is an AMAZING feeling. How often do you get to be a superhero? Smoke pot? Snort a little coke? Compared to driving the train at 400 watts for 20 minutes? LOL. Then doing it again an hour later? Booya! Those are my kinda drugs....

Thanks Snob, that post sums up my experience of cycling almost perfectly. Except that i still race around on bikes and try to ignore the (still quite rare where i am) extraordinary performances that jump out every now and then.

2. I cancelled every subscription and do not visit a single "cycling" website because they were all complicit in The Lance Thing and got rich on ad money and then basically confess to it in the same bullshit way Lance did. Of course some of these geniuses fell for that UCI Overlord Tweeties guy as well. Not naming names but it sounds like SmelloNews.

I will ride my bike and love it and fuck the lot of them right in their Cippolini.

About Me

While I love cycling and embrace it in all its forms, I'm also extremely critical. So I present to you my venting for your amusement and betterment. No offense meant to the critiqued. Always keep riding!